Read this book to help run teams that are split across London and California. instead of any analysis for how to make remote work effective, I got cheerleading about how great remote work is and that everybody should do it. The book managed to convince me of the opposite, now my teams are going to be fully relocated to London.
I probably blasted through this too fast, but enjoyed it. I’ll be reading the series. I appreciated the commentary on translation, the first person AI perspective, and the gender ambiguity, although the empire felt too close to the Chronicles of Riddick, and the Presger seemed a lot like the Consu from Old Man’s War.
Learned a few new good things. I wish there were more numbers and analysis of markets rather than generic strategies on value add and making offers with financing.
More informative than other books I’ve read on the subject, a solid grounding in the underlying philosophy and a dispassionate view of the competing viewpoints. While mainly written from a UK perspective, it includes a good overview of the American and European views. The author’s restraint from editorializing is laudable, and the book is wonderfully brief. Highly recommended.
Makes me want to start a startup.
I liked the overview of the subject, and the author does a good job of illustrating how malleable the concepts around the 1st amendment are, but the organization of the book was confusing, and the author was clearly unable to keep his own biases out of the narrative. Sadly it makes me distrust the rest of the content I read. Update After reading more books on the subject, this seems to be one of the more neutral takes.
Didn’t have anything insightful or actionable. Something along the lines of ‘be careful with ML, it can do things you don’t expect’ followed by a lot of examples where ML matters in people’s lives (in a bad way).
The concepts were good, but this would have been more useful as an article, not a book.
I didn’t really enjoy this book. There’s so much going on, but nothing had depth, and even the plot didn’t make it far. The politics felt shallow, written mainly in the service of plot. The genderless bias was interesting, but half of the characters were breaking the rules, so maybe they weren’t really rules to begin with. The science fiction aspects felt tacked on and surface level. The narrator interjections started out interesting, but ended up tedious. The theological / existential questions may have been the most interesting parts of the book, but they never went anywhere.
tl;dr - Russian authorities were slower than their Chinese/American counterparts understanding the potential impact of the web, but now they get it, so now Putin is in charge. A great chapter on Snowden as well.